July 2010Monthly Archives

Weight up, measurements same

I was a bit concerned the first few days of practicing vegetarianism when my weight was going up. My weight seems to have stabilized now and may even be starting to go down. Yesterday, I noticed as I was getting dressed that my pants seemed a bit looser. I took a set of measurements and found that overall they had remained the same in spite of the recent climb in weight. My abdomen measurement was down by 1″.

My portions were rather large the first few days. I have begun experimenting with smaller portions to see if I can be satisfied with less. So far, that is going well.

I have had some difficulty eating in a vegan way when going to restaurants. There really aren’t that many choices. Soups may have a meat broth or there may be egg and dairy in baked goods. Grains in restaurants tend not to be whole as well. Since I have taken up veganism for health more than philosophy, I have decided to choose my foods in restaurants according to what I perceive to be the most healthful with minimal animal products even if they may not be perfectly vegan. At home, though, I am choosing and preparing vegan foods for myself.

One thing I have discovered is that I do not have very many vegan options in my current recipe database. Since having a good cookbook was so instrumental when I did the HCG Diet, I decided to buy a couple of vegan cookbooks for myself. I ordered these: 500 Vegan Recipes: An Amazing Variety of Delicious Recipes, From Chilis and Casseroles to Crumbles, Crisps, and Cookies by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman and 1,000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson. I also ordered a book held at the library: Food for Life: How the New Four Food Groups Can Save Your Life by Neal Barnard, M.D. My local branch should receive it today.

One of the reasons I chose to try veganism was because I felt sluggish when I was eating a diet high in animal foods. Already, I have seen improvements. I am beginning to wake up earlier, and I feel better generally.

[Edit: This post was recovered from my old Exploring Veganism blog. Veganism ultimately proved to be an inappropriate approach for me.]

Trying out veganism

I’ve been reading The China Study lately. Its main message is that we can control our health outcomes by adopting a mostly vegan diet. According to the authors, studies show that animal proteins cause the so-called Western diseases of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

During the animal studies, they noticed that rats fed a plant-based diet were more active than those on a diet including animal protein. They gave the rats metered exercise wheels and found out very quickly that the rats on the plant-based diet were twice as active!

During the last several days, I’ve felt very sluggish. During this time, I ate a lot of dairy and meat, since that sort of thing is encouraged when one follows a low carbohydrate diet. When I read about the vegan rats, it dawned on me that the low carbohydrate high animal protein diet could be the cause of that sluggishness. I decided to give veganism a try to see if I felt better.

Yesterday was my first day on a vegan diet. It’s probably too soon to tell if I’m feeling better. I’m not exactly sure what metric to use for that. Perhaps I could look at how many hours I sleep. Last week, I slept in a lot, often sleeping until 11:00 AM or noon. I used information from Low-cost vegan meal plans.: An article from: Vegetarian Journal as a model for how to plan the meals. I certainly did not lack for protein. According to Diet Pro, I got 82 g of protein, which is more than the 55 g or so that I need. I got 20.5 mg of iron, too, which is plenty, even for a woman. I was surprised that I got 75% of my B12 need as well. I might have gotten more, since I don’t have B12 amounts in my database for some of the foods I ate.

[Edit: This post was recovered from my old Exploring Veganism blog. Veganism ultimately proved to be an inappropriate approach for me.]